What kind of life do you want? How do you want to live? It's largely up to you.
The decisions you make each day give shape and direction to the way your life unfolds.
You can choose activities that are physically healthy, emotionally uplifting, and spiritually
nourishing, or you can squander your life, filling those precious moments with meaningless trivia,
numbing your mind, deadening your senses, and even harming your body.
About 2500 years ago, the philosopher Socrates said,
"The unexamined life is not worth living." With these words, he called
our attention to deeper dimensions of life and he encouraged us to seek it's highest purpose.
About the same time, a similar message was proclaimed by a wise sage in India
who said, "If you fail to discover supreme truth in this lifetime, the loss is immeasurable".
To explore life's deeper dimensions and pursue its highest purpose is to
undertake what many call a spiritual journey, a journey of inner exploration. Before you travel
to an unfamiliar place, it's usually helpful to get directions or guidance of some kind.
The same is true for a spiritual journey. The enlightened masters of every religious tradition
are like guides who can help you find the route that they themselves once traveled.
This presentation is based on the wisdom of rishis, the sages of ancient India.
Their teachings are found in Sanskrit scriptures that can serve as a road map of sorts,
helping you follow in the footsteps of the sages and discover what they discovered so long ago.
Every journey begins here. From the moment we're born, we all seek warmth, security,
and nourishment in mother's loving embrace. In other words, we seek happiness and contentment.
The contentment we find at mother's breast is perfect, it's blissful, complete. We feel
deeply bonded with mother, united or merged with her, like when we were still in her womb.
That exquisite feeling of oneness and total peace is an experience we all love.
We crave comfort and security, and we loathe hunger, pain, isolation, and fear. Simply put,
we seek contentment, perfect contentment, and we seek it constantly,
in every situation, throughout our lives. Seeking contentment is fundamental to life; it's a primal
drive associated with the instinct for survival that's genetically hard-wired in us all.
Even a few moments away from mother can make a baby feel anxious and miserable.
In the absence of her loving embrace, a baby no longer experiences perfect contentment. So,
a new-born baby naturally considers mother to be the primary source of happiness and contentment.
Father soon becomes another source of happiness and contentment. And before long,
a baby's world expands to include many other sources, sources like like cookies and ice cream,
and daddy's silly sounds, and colorful toys of all shapes and sizes. It's hardly surprising that
a toddler considers ice cream, cookies and toys to be objects of happiness. If you had a favorite toy
as a child, you probably believed that happiness came from the toy itself.
Of course, as adults we all know that ice cream and toys are not actually sources of happiness.
Happiness is not an ingredient in ice cream, like milk and sugar. We know that happiness
comes from within, as the saying goes. But children don't know that. As babies, they
think happiness comes from mother. As toddlers, they think happiness comes from cookies and toys.
As pre-teens, they're likely to seek happiness in action-filled video games and fashionable clothes.
In each case, children believe the source of happiness to be outside of themselves,
because they haven't yet discovered that happiness truly comes from within.
Yet for many adults, the situation isn't so different.
When you buy a new car or a new outfit, it makes you happy, and that happiness might
seem to come from the car or clothes, even though you know better. The desire for
happiness can lead you to watch the latest movies, to dine in fancy restaurants,
to vacation in exotic resorts, and to purchase every imaginable kind of product, all for the
sake of gaining the very happiness that we all say comes from within. So, what's going on here?
Everyone makes this same mistake. When we experience pleasurable things and happiness arises
within us, it's natural to falsely attribute the source of our happiness to the things we enjoy.
But the fact is, happiness is no more present in a new car or a new
outfit than it is in ice cream or toys.
It seems surprising that so many people seek happiness and contentment throughout their
lifetimes without taking even a few moments to consider the true, inner source of the happiness
they seek. As a result, they spend their entire lives looking for happiness in all the wrong
places. A traditional story from India describes a musk deer who smells the distinct scent of a
potential mate and eagerly searches the vast forest for the source of that scent, without
realizing that it actually emanates from glands on its own body. We're all bit like those musk deer,
searching the vast world for the source of happiness that's actually hidden within us.
An ancient rishi contemplated this problem and said, "We're all born with our senses directed
outwards, into the world. So we naturally look for happiness in the world, not within ourselves.
But some wise ones who sought the actual source of happiness turned
their attention within and discovered the true Self."
You, too, can turn your attention within, as the ancient rishis did. You can
use their teachings to guide your personal journey of inner exploration.
In this way, you can discover what the rishis discovered: that the true Self, the inner
reality or divinity they called atma, is the actual source of happiness and contentment.